Huron River, 7/27

Went down to the Huron at Island Park for an hour before dark last night. Fished olive and black wooly buggers and got only nips. Switched to a brown streamer with yellow rubber legs and a copper conehead and caught 4 10-12" smallmouth in 5 casts, plus some smaller ones and a 7" rock bass. My best rockie to date out of the Huron.

Was a little harried when I got to the river last night--it had been a busy afternoon and I got to the water later than I wanted to. I rigged in a grim haste and waded into the river with all the expansive attentiveness that jogging on a treadmill demands. I didn't notice until I first changed flies what a perfect night it was to be outdoors--still, neither hot nor cool, a canzon of birdsong animating the catalpas and mulberries lining the river, the air thick with the fecund-sweet smell of the Huron. (Some nights the river's surface doesn't seem like a sharp boundary--the stream simply fades as it gets farther from its bed.) As these things registered, a calm began spreading through my body like sunlight inching its way across a lake at dawn, and all thoughts of distant things ceased. I was ready for the fish that would come.